WARTON LECTURE ON ENGLISH POETRY Wallace Stevens: Hypotheses and Contradictions HELEN VENDLER Harvard University The torment of fastidious thought grew slack, Another, still more bellicose, came on. The Comedian as the Letter C 1 The Concept Of The Arrière-Penseur Reason’s Constant Ruin (Two of Stevens’s titles for poems never written)2 There is no reality; there is the human consciousness ceaselessly forming, reform- ing, earning, suffering, spiritually stamping worlds from its creative property.... In this capacity . the uppermost [step] says: there is only the idea, the great, objective idea. It is eternity; it is the world order; it lives by abstraction; it is the formula or art. (Gottfried Benn, The Way of an Intellectualist)3 Your art has deserted the temples and the sacrificial vessels, it has ceased to have anything to do with the painting of pillars, and the painting of chapels is no longer anything for you either. You are using your own skin for wallpaper, and nothing can save you. (Gottfried Benn, Artists and Old Age)4 I AM HAPPY TO CONTINUE, by this lecture on an American poet, the literary history of poetry begun in such a memorable way by Thomas Warton. Though my title names hypotheses and contradictions as two Read at the Academy 17 May 2000. 1 Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems (New York, 1954), 37, henceforth cited as CP with paren- thetical page references in text. 2 Cited from Wallace Stevens’ notebook From Pieces of Paper, in George Lensing, Wallace Stevens: A Poet’s Growth (Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1986), 183. 3 Gottfried Benn, Prose, Essays, Poems, ed. Volkmar Sander (New York, 1987), 33. 4 Ibid., 183. Proceedings of the British Academy, 111, 225–44. © The British Academy 2001. Copyright © The British Academy 2001 – all rights reserved 226 Helen Vendler aspects of the work of the poet Wallace Stevens, I think of these practices as his ifs and ors and buts. These three words, representing speculation on the one hand, and obstruction of speculation on the other, play a visibly large role in Stevens’s poetry. To remark on Stevens’s need for these forms of thought, and yet his late resistance to them, is one way to track his evolution—and his idiosyncrasy—as a poet. I hope to show that by using, questioning, and eventually forsaking these rhetorical means, Stevens over time seeks out truth in different ways. First, by dialectical means, he looks for ‘the’ truth; then, adopting a Nietzschean multiplicity, he argues for ‘truths’; but in his late work he aims to approach, by a series of asymptotic figures, ‘a’ truth plausible to his exacting mind. Stevens’s poems were written during the fifty years between his matric- ulation at Harvard and his death at seventy-five. His long life was rela- tively without incident: he was born, in Pennsylvania, of Pennsylvania Dutch—that is to say German—extraction in 1879; his father, Garrett Stevens, was a lawyer who wanted his sons to be lawyers, and all three of them eventually obeyed him. Garrett Stevens was willing to send his brilliant son Wallace to Harvard, but would support him there for only three years, since one could enter law school after three years at the university. On his departure without a degree from Harvard, Stevens, dis- regarding his father’s wishes, did not immediately enter law school, but became a newspaper reporter in New York. Discouraged by both the work and the salary, Stevens capitulated and went to New York University Law School, after which he had various disappointing short-term pos- itions as a lawyer in New York. In 1916 he found a job as a surety lawyer with the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Insurance Company of Connecticut, where he remained till he died in 1955. In the first years of Stevens’s employment at the Hartford his work was arduous, requiring frequent train-travel across the United States to investigate insurance claims, and in those years Stevens wrote little poetry. Eventually, as he rose in the company, his life became less harried, and when he was 44, he published his first book, Harmonium, with Knopf. Other volumes followed steadily, and in l954, some months before Stevens’s death from cancer, his Collected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Since his death, his fame has grown steadily, but he remains, in the eyes of us all, a difficult poet, the one who wrote, in a collection of pensées to which he gave the Erasmian title Adagia, that a poem ‘must resist the intelligence almost successfully’. Although Stevens’s life had many ecstatic moments, it was not in the usual sense a happy life. His marriage became increasingly difficult, as his Copyright © The British Academy 2001 – all rights reserved WALLACE STEVENS 227 beautiful but uneducated wife Elsie—once the model for the American Liberty dime—retreated into homesickness, estrangement, and suspi- cion: no friends or acquaintances could be invited to the house, not even by the child of the marriage, Stevens’s daughter Holly. Each night, after dinner, Stevens retreated to his small separate study and bedroom upstairs, where he read, listened to music, wrote letters, and composed poetry. It was an intensely lonely life, relieved by occasional trips to New York museums, and by his eventually good relations with his daughter and her son Peter. At Harvard, Stevens had abandoned the Protestantism of his parents for the skeptical Lucretian naturalism of his acquaintance George Santayana. This philosophic materialism was buttressed by Stevens’s intimate knowledge of the natural world: he was a great walker in his youth, often covering thirty miles in a single day. Spring warmed him into life; winter chilled him into despair. He became the most exquisite poet of seasonal change since Keats, by whom he was permanently influenced. Many of Stevens’s early poems became intelligible to readers through their relation to Romantic verse: Sunday Morning, for instance, ends in homage to Keats’s To Autumn. Instead of Keats’s agricultural and domestic landscape, populated by lambs, robins, and swallows, Stevens’s American scene offers mountains and an uncultivated wilderness, popu- lated by deer, quail, and pigeons. Keats’s goddess of the season has vanished, and human beings exist in isolation: Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail Whistle about us their spontaneous cries; Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness; And, in the isolation of the sky, At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink Downward to darkness, on extended wings. [70] As a young reader, I could move easily into such a poem; it was only a step from Keats to the Keatsian elements in Stevens. I had far more trouble in understanding why Stevens would write certain other poems, among them the one that opened Harmonium (and which is still the first piece one sees in the Collected Poems). I realised that this strategically placed poem, Earthy Anecdote, must be some sort of manifesto, but of what was it the proclamation? Like most conceptual art, this 1918 poem5 5 Dates cited for individual poems in this essay follow those given in Holly Stevens, ed., Wallace Stevens: The Palm at the End of the Mind (New York, 1972), ix–xv. Copyright © The British Academy 2001 – all rights reserved 228 Helen Vendler offers no elaboration of its stubbornly repeated plot—that of a daily con- test between deer (fiercely charging straight ahead) and a mountain lion (named by its folk-appellation, ‘firecat’) that obtrudes itself in the path of the bucks: Earthy Anecdote Every time the bucks went clattering Over Oklahoma A firecat bristled in the way. Wherever they went, They went clattering, Until they swerved In a swift, circular line To the right, Because of the firecat. Or until they swerved In a swift, circular line To the left, Because of the firecat. The bucks clattered. The firecat went leaping, To the right, to the left, And Bristled in the way. Later, the firecat closed his bright eyes And slept. [3] The firecat’s only purpose in his waking hours is to make the bucks swerve. The game goes on all day, conceived and prolonged by the bright eyes of the firecat, and it comes to an end only when the firecat sleeps. Had the firecat not ‘bristled in the way’ the bucks would have unswerv- ingly clattered over the plain of Oklahoma in an unimpeded straight line. At least one way of reading this little parable is to see it as an enact- ing of the response of the mind’s original inertia when it encounters new hypotheses and then contradictions of these very hypotheses. Once our thoughts are set on an inertial straight path, they will not become invent- ive unless blocked: and one can see the bucks as a form of uncreative life forced into creativity by the bright-eyed obstacle of intelligence. In Stevens, the obstacle that forces the swerve is dialectically self-created: ifs and ors and buts, with their bright-eyed queries, force the mind into alter- native paths. I believe that this apparently trivial little poem revealed to Copyright © The British Academy 2001 – all rights reserved WALLACE STEVENS 229 Stevens, as he wrote it, how much his art depended on obstructions and the consequent swerves provoked by them, and that he therefore gave Earthy Anecdote pride of place both in his first volume and in the final collection of his poems. When in 1922 Stevens comes to organise his long Browningesque autobiography in verse, The Comedian as the Letter C, he does so by means of successive geographic hypotheses, each contradicting the former.